The Religion of Charles Dickens

Rev. Jeffrey Symynkywicz, November 3, 2002

In an article in Household Words, a weekly periodical (or miscellany,
as they used to call such publications) which he published during the
1850s, Charles Dickens stated his religious creed:

“The truth of life is love,” he wrote, “and
all which negatives love is false; and every drop of blood that ever flowed
in preservation of any dogma, bore in its necessity the condemnation of
that dogma.”

This, more succinctly and less-wordily than we might expect from Dickens,
perhaps, was the essential core of his faith: LOVE ONE ANOTHER.

But, of course, there is more to the story than that…

Charles Dickens was born at Landport, Portsea, just outside London, in
1812. He was the second of eight children, in a very poor family: his
father and various members of the family spent time in debtor’s
prison; Dickens himself worked as a child laborer in a shoe-blacking factory.
When he was just five, the family moved to Chatham, near London’s
notorious East End. Here, he was, in the words of one biographer, “In
essence… an abandoned child, ill lodged, underfed, poorly educated,
often aimlessly wandering the streets.”

His parents were nominal Anglicans, members of the Church of England,
but they did not attend services regularly. But while living in Chatham,
they lived next door to the Rev. William Giles, the local Baptist minister;
so they would go to chapel occasionally to hear their neighbor, whom they
liked and admired and respected, preach a sermon.

But if his parents were pleasantly disposed towards the Rev. Mr. Giles,
young Charles most certainly was not. He hated church; he loathed the
experience of being carted off the chapel; he suffered bitterly through
sermons which sometimes lasted up to two hours! (And you thought
you had it rough…)

Dickens’ biographer, Edgar Johnson, describes the scene:

“Sitting there uncomfortably on a Sunday, he felt as though his
mind were being steamed out of him, hating the minister’s ‘big
round face’ looking ‘up the inside of his outstretched coat
sleeves as if it were a telescope’ and loathing ‘his lumbering
jocularity’. Hailed out of chapel, the joy would find himself
‘catechized respecting’ the minister’s ‘fifthly,
his sixthly, and his seventhly’, until he ‘regarded that
reverend person in the light of the most dismal and oppressive Charade.’”

“These experiences,” writes Johnson, “laid the foundation
for his lifelong… revulsion from any formal religious affiliation.”

Late in April of 1836, Sir Andrew Agnew introduced a bill in Parliament
that would have prohibited not only all work on the Sabbath, but most
recreation as well. Dickens saw red. He believed the proposal ludicrous,
repressive, and puritanical. It also exhibited a clear class bias, Dickens
believed: the pleasures of the well-to-do went untouched under Agnew’s
proposal; they could still have their servants cook their elaborate Sunday
dinners; they could still travel all over town in their carriages; private
concerts and oratorios at home were allowed. But most of the pleasures
of the lower classes were banned: there could be no weekend excursions
and picnics to the countryside; the coffee shops and market stalls were
all to be closed.

“Writing in a hot rage,” Johnson says, “Dickens tore
off a molten political pamphlet, Sunday Under Three Heads…
signed with the pseudonym ‘Timothy Sparks’.”

Sunday Under Three Heads gives us a clear picture of how much
Dickens loathed the religious and social myopia of his day:

“The iron-hearted man who would deprive… people of their
only pleasures, Dickens pointed out, would be doing their best to drive
the respectable poor into filth, disease, fornication, and drunken squalor…
[It would] deprive them of even the most humble relaxation, the breath
of country air, the game of cricket, available to the more fortunate.
They had no amusement for the mind, no means of exercising the body.
Consequently, they flew to the gin shop as their only recourse, and
then, when they lie wallowing in the gutter, ‘your saintly law-givers
lift up their hands to heaven, and exclaim for a day which shall convert
the day intended for rest and cheerfulness, into one of universal gloom,
bigotry, and persecution.”

Agnew’s bill was easily defeated in the House of Commons, but it
would not be the last time that Dickens would express his dislike of the
evangelical churches and their not-so-reverend shepherds. In the Pickwick
Papers, Dickens presents the portrait of the red-nosed, hypocritical
Rev. Mr. Stiggins, speaking before an assembly of the United Grand Junction
Ebeneezer Temperance Association:

The Rev. Mr. Stiggins no sooner entered than there was a great clapping
of hands, and stamping of feet, and flourishing of handkerchiefs, to all
of which manifestations of delight, Brother Stiggins returned no acknowledgment,
with a wild eye and a fixed smile, at the extreme top of the wick of the
candle on the table, swaying his body to and fro… in a very unsteady
and uncertain manner.

“Are you unwell, Brother Stiggins?” whispered Mr. Anthony
Humm.

“I am all right, sir,” replied Mr. Stiggins, in a tone
in which ferocity was blended with an extreme thickness of utterance.
“I am all right, sir.”

The meeting looked at each other with raised eyelids, and a murmur
of astonishment ran through the room.”

“It is my opinion, sir,” said Mr. Stiggins, unbuttoning
his coat and speaking very loudly, “It is my opinion, sir, that
this meeting is drunk, sir. You are drunk, sir!”
With this, Mr. Stiggins, entertaining a praiseworthy desire to promote
the sobriety of the meeting… hit Brother Humm on the summit of
the nose.”

The “Reverend” Mr. Stiggins would be followed, in turn, by
another drunken minister, Melchisedech Howler in Dombey and Son,
and then by Rev. Chadbrand in Bleak House, described by one literary
critic as “oily” and by another as a “pompous, eloquent
humbug”. Indeed, Dickens’ own view of the evangelical clergy
of his day is aptly summarized by Kit in The Old Curiosty Shop,
when he derides his mother’s habit of going off to chapel:

“Ah, mother,” said Kit, taking out his clasp-knife and
falling upon a great piece of bread and meat which she had ready for
him, hours before, “what a one you are! There an’t a many
such as you, I know.”

“I hope there are many a great deal better, Kit,” said
Mrs. Nubbles, “and that there are, or ought to be, “acordin’
to what the parson at chapel says.”

“’Much he knows about it,” returned Kit
contemptuously. “Wait till he’s a widder and works like
you do, and gets as little, and does as much, and keeps his spirit up
the same, and then I’ll ask him what’s o’clock
and trust him to being right to half a second.”

As we have seen, Dickens seems to have grown up with a deep aversion
to many of the forms and structures of organized religion. Once he was
out of his parents’ house and out on his own, he refused to go to
church at all, until much later in his life. Then, like so many people
who don’t believe in organized religion, Dickens decided to become
a Unitarian instead!

During the early 1840s, Dickens was interested to learn that many of
his American friends in Boston and Cambridge were members of the Unitarian
faith. Before long, he began to correspond with William Ellery Channing,
one of the founders of the Unitarian movement in America, and a truly
brilliant thinker of his day. When he visited Boston in 1842 while on
an American tour, Dickens called upon Channing, and the two became friends.
It was Channing, many said, who convinced Dickens that he truly was a
Unitarian himself. After his return to London, Dickens began to attend
services at several Unitarian chapels there, and became very close to
Rev. Edward Taggart, a leading British Unitarian of the day. Around this
time, he wrote in a letter to a friend:

“I have carried into effect an old idea of mine and joined the
Unitarians, who would do something for human improvement, if they could;
and who practice charity and toleration.”

Dickens’ dislike of theological dogma, his skepticism about matters
supernatural, and his belief that faith must show itself through good
works, all resonated clearly within the Unitarianism of his day, on both
sides of the Atlantic. Like Channing and the other early Unitarians, Dickens
viewed God as loving Father, and not as the vengeful tyrant implied by
Calvinism. Dickens did not believe in the Virgin Birth of Christ, but
did revere and cherish the strikingly human and humane example
of Jesus of Nazareth, and the holy nature of his earthy mission. He even
wrote a life of Jesus for children, The Life of Our Lord, not
published until after his death.

But while Dickens had much in common with the Unitarianism of his day,
he was too much of a creative and independent thinker to be pigeonholed
in the commonly held ideals of any particular household of faith (even
our own). His ideas were a bubbling cauldron, a creative confluence of
different influences. So now—and let us hope not in the
spirit of boring old Rev. Giles—let me add my own “fifthly,
sixthly, and seventhly” regarding the religion of Charles Dickens—and
in much less than two hours, I promise!

Firstly, as we have seen, Dickens felt a deep antipathy throughout
his life for any religion based upon the trappings of faith alone.
He knew very well that some preachers were a bit too righteous, and that
they did protest too much. “By their fruits (and not by their words)
you shall really know them,” Dickens believed.

Dickens had little patience with longwinded, dry preaching, as well.
Church often got in the way of people’s deep, true religious sentiments,
he thought. “You will remember that you have never at home been
wearied about religious observances or mere formalities,” he wrote
his son.

Instead, Dickens proposed a simple, direct religion of the heart, based
upon the teachings and example of Jesus—a simple, basic Christianity,
founded upon the Golden Rule and the Gospel call to “love one another”.

Secondly, Dickens believed that all people had a religious obligation
to do good, and to leave the world a better place than they found
it.

“Business!” the ghost of Jacob Marley shrieks to Scrooge,
“Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business…
The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive
ocean of my business!”

All people had a responsibility to do good, Dickens believed, and the
higher one’s station in life, the greater one’s share of the
responsibility.

Thirdly, Dickens believed in the interdependence of all living creatures,
and that each and every person had his or her important role to play in
the unfolding of our common human drama. The French critic Andre
Maurois believed that the insistence of Dickens upon details—details—details—in
writing down every aspect of a given situation in his work—all
of the turkeys, sausages, stuffing—everything anyone could ever
want to know about the plum pudding, the mistletoe, the holly—all
of these long, detailed, descriptive passages that seem so “typically
Dickensonian”, that drove us to distraction when we had to read
Dickens in high school, perhaps—arose from a deep sense within Dickens—a
spiritual sense, really—that everything was criticial to the
existence of everything else.

Likewise, in the works of Dickens, people are shown to be deeply
and intricately interrelated, too—and their actions are shown to
reverberate in the lives of others, even more deeply than they realize.
Everything—everyone—is connected and related, it
seems. Sometimes, we grasp the reality of our interdependence only suddenly,
violently—through coincidence, perhaps—or in the apparent
workings of providence, or fate, or grace. But it is not “mere fate”
at work here, Dickens would seem to say, and there are, truly, no coincidences.
It is, rather, our own choices finding their consequences; seeds planted
perhaps in the far distant past, finally coming to fruition, in ways never
imagined possible.

Fourthly, Dickens believed that most people were basically good most
of the time, and that evil was perpetrated by a tiny fraction of
society at the expense of all others. Looking around at the great mass
of humanity, Dickens saw people who were basically decent, honest, and
fair. But Dickens also allows that those with a depraved view of reality
can impose their skewed sense of right and wrong upon those weaker than
they are. The worst scoundrels in the Dickens universe are those who stunt
a child’s experience of joy and wonder and creativity,
and so sew seeds of evil and despair where natural goodness and happiness
should arise instead.

Fifthy, Dickens believed that the social code of his day failed to
respond adequately to human need. For his, this was a religious question
as well as a social one. To fail to respond to poverty and injustice was,
in fact, a denial of the very Christian faith which the leaders of the
society claimed to be following.

There is a clear equation in Dickens’ work between the poverty
and depravity of the slums and a deeper vision of Hell. Abject, hopeless
poverty was hell to Dickens—a hell he had experienced in
his own life. Poverty flew in the face of the abundance nature intended
for all. In the words of one critic, Dickens believed that “the
atoms of the physical world were impregnated with moral aptitude,”
and when one person held another in bondage, in slavery, in ignorance,
in hopelessness, the very physical world recoiled in judgment.

But there was always hope, even for the most wicked. Sixthly, Dickens
believed that even the most despicable, self-centered, loathsome creatures
could change; that a change of heart—a conversion experience—was
always possible. Perhaps the most famous conversion experience in the
work of Dickens is Scrooge, of course. But while it might be the most
famous, it may in other ways be the least typical. While a great and profound
change of heart is at the center of a number of Dickens most important
works—A Tale of Two Cities; Great Expectations; David Coppefield;
Hard Times—only in the case of A Christmas Carol does
it take place in a supernatural, mysterious sort of way. In most other
cases, it occurs when the characters use their own experiences and sensibilities
to shed new light of the path down which they ought to be traveling, and
decide to change course in their lives. What we choose is what
we are, Dickens believed; and we are free to choose who we will be.

Seventhly (and lastly—praise the Lord!) in his work and in his
life, Dickens exhibited a philosophy that might be described as “stoicism”--
simply put, a “grin and bear in” view of human existence.
“Mankind, in the midst of a hostile universe, should be like Mr.
Micawber [in David Copperfield] beset by his creditors and face
the future with confidence” secure in the faith that all will be
well.

Dickens, no doubt, would have agreed with Woody Allen, who once said,
“Life is full of miserableness, loneliness, unhappiness, and suffering—and
it’s all over much too quickly.” Dickens, like Blake before
him, knew that we human ones “were made for joy and woe”,
and he is truly masterful in portraying the tragedy amidst the joy and
the joy amidst the tragedy, wherein lies the true essence of spirituality,
it seems to me.

We sons and daughters of a later, no less conflicted best of times and
worst of times, could do worse than heed these words of that great man,
Charles Dickens:

The timid hand stretched forth to aid
a brother in his need;
A kindly word in grief’s dark hour
that proves a friend indeed;
The plea for mercy softly breathed
when justice threatens high,
The sorrow of a contrite heart—
these things shall never die.

Let nothing pass, for every hand
must find some work to do,
Lose not a chance to waken love—
be firm and just and true.
So shall a light that cannot fade
beam on thee from on high,
And angel voices say to thee—
“These things shall never die.”

Perhaps this is the religion of Charles Dickens, purely and simply: “The
truth of life is love.”